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Heavy Rain Previews Show Promise
As the February release date for Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain nears, several publications have gotten a chance for some hands-on time with the game and seem to be intrigued by what they saw. Quoting the Opposable Thumbs blog: "The game grabs you during the quiet moments where nothing 'happens.' When you look at a picture your child drew. When you're questioning someone about a crime. When you're trying to figure out how to react to a violent situation. The preview we were sent put me in different situations as I played a small handful of characters, and each one provided a few tiny moments that were surprising in terms of storytelling or subtlety." Eurogamer's previewer had a similar reaction: "To my great delight as well — Heavy Rain isn't a mature game because it has unhappy families and moody lighting, it's a mature game because it anticipates an adult response from the player and is prepared to receive it."
Do we HAVE to turn this into a system war? Can't we instead talk about Heavy Rain?
Perhaps you should consider the word "game" more like you consider the word "film." There really isn't anything in the definition of a game that says it must be fun. I mean, chess is a game and it is not exactly the kind of fun that you probably associate with fps video games.
Remind me: how many millions of people play The Sims?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My problem with Indigo Prophecy was that, while I expected the game to immerse me into an intriguing mystery-thriller plotline (which it did for the first half), I did not expect it to suddenly devolve into a silly SciFi Channel circus about space aliens and Mayan Kung-Fu ghost people. I was totally engrossed and throroughly impressed with Indigo Prophecy, and then quite abruptly my 'wow's became 'WTF's. I hope Heavy Rain doesn't make the same mistake.
I think games like this serve to further gaming as an art form, which is something that isn't done nearly enough. Sadly, the common perception of games is that they are for children, and that adults who play them are silly and unwilling to grow up. Sure, casual games are changing this, but only becasue their casual nature makes them easier for 'adults' to accept and enjoy. Making games serious will allow gaming to advance as an artistic medium. The mundane details, as you put it, allow for introspection, and show that gaming can have much, much deeper meaning than is normally attributed to it. If games continue to be made in such a style, they can have a much greater impact than movies (for example), due to their immersive nature. Imagine watching a provocative and thought-provoking artistic film, and compare the impact that can have to the potential impact of actually making the decisions within the story, if the story were to be told through a game. I suppose you're right, this game doesn't look fun, but I think it can help to further games as an art form.
If your day revolves around rescuing hookers, investigating serial killers and seducing creepy guys in nightclubs, that's really fine with me.
Mine doesn't, so the game seems interesting enough to me.
Adding mundane things can improve a game if the object is not the mundane actions, but a deeper immersion in a story.
Any good story I know contains lots of mundane parts that are not necessary for the story, but are still essential to make it work.
And e.g. many Bergman or von Trier movies are not exactly "fun" either. But they are still fascinating, intriguing and quite often challenging.
Err, and they don't sell well.
I imagine the fun part of the game comes in once you play through the normal, mundane hour and shit goes very wrong and you start doing detective work. The first hour is to establish your life, as the article says. Then your life goes sideways.
I'm not trying to pick a fight, but I disagree (a little).
I recently was replaying Shadow of the Colossus. To me, there is a game that exemplifies art. It was beautiful to watch, immersive, playing it was unlike anything I had played before, and the story was deep and dramatic. (It even ended on a sad note for those who believe that anything that makes you happy can't be art.)
Forcing someone to play through an hour of boring, everyday tasks is less than art. It's not even very creative (in my opinion). How many movies and books and other things have been made that focus on everyday things?
Or, for that matter, how many games already been made where the user gets to choose between decisions (Black-and-White, Fate [I think], that one with the biological superhero)? Every time, while the game is interesting, the decision making process is hampered by the vary fact that a game is limited to what the designers have already though up. Currently, decision-based games are more like choose-your-own-adventure books. The decisions are more thrown in to add "replay value" than to truly give the user choices. (Save the baby, or let it die? Play it twice, to see the different cut-scenes! Yay, more hours of gameplay...)
The gaming medium as art has to be more than just taking a movie or book and slapping lame controls on it. That's like doing a crayon drawing in oils, and calling it art. It needs to incorporate what makes games different than the other mediums.
This game represents everything I hate about modern games. Apparently we want better lighting, better animations more life-like graphics. This striving for hyper-realism is driving me nuts.
The computer allows us to make everything, and yet we insist on creating worlds that are essentially no different from the one we live in. Where is the weird, the fantastic, the horrible and the wonderful? Why do we settle, when we can have anything? When do we start creating art?